Tahoe Still

(September 2021. After finally leaving Reno, I spent some time to myself by Lake Tahoe. I wrote this poem at a lovely little pebbly public beach where people bring their dogs. I let Waldo have fun playing with the other dogs while I got high and wrote this poem. The lake looked great, which was rare then during the wildfires, which had de-blued the lake by smogging the sky. In my opinion this is the strongest Tahoe poem, and one of the stronger poems from that whole period of my life, but that’s just me. I improved as a poet all year, but I didn’t write as much from May-September because I busied myself with hosting various people in my bus— my family, my friends, and my partner. But finally, here in Tahoe in September, I was alone again, and solitude is good for poetry. I banged this out in one take with almost no edits, and I really like it; I think “Myself, in what is left of the broken promised land” is one of the best lines I’ve written, at least from the point of view of the American poetry tradition and key themes in American thought. Whitman and Eliot are always duking it out in my brain, but Whitman will always win. Plus, there are lots of delightful lines about rocks and pebbles.)

This place is perfect.
How can such muchness be
So simple?

The water stiller than I’ve ever seen.
This massive blue surface of the Sierras
Surrounded by gray rock of ground,
Green seen from space, this place
Somehow the weighted center of the American West,
Somehow mere hours from more beauty
Than one life could ever hold,
Somehow a heart perpetually overflowing—
Old rocks in new eyes beholding paradise
Among many under the turquoise skies
Along the Pacific Crest’s cascading Zions,
Surrounded by wildfires, safe for now in a piece of Eden
Preserved, thinking by necessity hopeful romantic thoughts
Myself, in what is left of the broken promised land.

The water is no longer so still—
Something passing has made waves
Which, isolated from interference, wash the shore
With perfect sine functions rolling along,
Splashing with the significance of a single signal.

The shore’s pebbles are the edge of earth’s fire,
The ends of eons of molten churning
And cooling and breaking and proliferation
Of evermore everdying nouns.
Their smallnesses are of their largeness.
My feet sinking in touch hundreds of frozen fires
Submerged in a solution of sweat and cloud,
The feet and the rocks and the water all touching,
Somehow with immeasurable atomic gaps
Still all touching, still all moving together.